Today we're announcing something big, and we're going to ask for your help. We believe the Internet has started a revolution in entrepreneurship. It has never been less expensive or more possible to build an online business, to create an honest, innovative, true, fulfilling and valuable business.

Twitter has been one of the chief catalysts of my business success. While I've wasted plenty of hours on the platform, I've also used it to infiltrate the "cool kid" crowd, perform market research, and stay ahead of trends in my industry & beyond.

Note from Caleb: This is a guest post by Nathan Barry, an accomplished iOS designer who builds beautiful apps.In this essay he discusses the positioning and differentiation lessons he has learned through the Apple App Store that are just as important across all kinds of entrepreneurship. He discusses why building something that helps people, pricing at a premium, and launching early were main reasons why he has seen so much success.

Okay, I'll admit it. I'm trying to tell you not to do something I did for years. Obsess over traffic. Or at least traffic volume. I'm sure you've heard it before, traffic isn't important, targeted traffic is. In this post I'm going to give you some very specific results that show how much you would be missing if you focused solely on traffic volume and not at the type of traffic you are getting.

Blogging can be an incredible platform to build a business around. Blogging is a perfect way to become recognized as an expert in your field. But blogging can also become a trap that keeps you from your real goals.

What if you didn't even need a blog or audience of your own to bring your courses to the masses and earn a living from them? What if you could earn six figures teaching to a quarter million users on a single online learning platform?

A masterpiece is a difficult thing to create. We all have at least one—usually more than one—masterpiece in us, waiting to be created, waiting patiently to show its beautiful mane to the world around us. I’m 31 and I’ve created two masterpieces in my life.

Having a personal domain name can be a great resource. Whether or not you have bought a domain that is your actual name, there are a lot of different reasons to do so. Even if you have a hard last name to spell (like mine or something like Guillebeau) you can use your personal domain name as a living, breathing business card or host your full-fledged blog and website on it.

We noticed something unacceptable about the articles and interviews we've posted here over the past couple of years: we haven't featured nearly enough successful women bloggers and online entrepreneurs.

The Sparkline is the blog of Fizzle: honest training + vital community for people who want to build their thing and support themselves. It’s for creatives, makers, artists, hackers, bloggers and internetters willing to dig in and care about the what and why of independent business.